The place of gender in psychoanalysis

metapsychology, identity, new forms of subjectivation

Abstract

Felippe Figueiredo Lattanzio is a psychologist, psychoanalyst and PhD in psychology. He is a professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), and has been dedicating himself in recent years to the study of gender in the psychoanalytic theory. In the book that served as the guide of the present review, Lattanzio expands the binary and phallocentric logic present at the heart of psychoanalysis and proposes new paths for the construction of gender identity, emphasizing the link between gender and the social field. Lattanzio presents authors that were precursors of gender studies in the history of psychoanalysis, as well as the obstacles to the reception of these studies by the psychoanalytic community. The author follows in the next chapters making a theoretical stitching that has its starting point in the importance of the feminist movement for the understanding of the concept of gender, power relations and social normativities. Moreover, Lattanzio signals the intersection between repression and the feminine and a new perspective of positioning these concepts, proposing a new one: the becoming-woman. Finally, he criticizes rigid points of the theory that delay the search for otherness and the end of essentialism in psychoanalysis, aiming to establish the importance of the concept of gender in psychoanalysis.